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Creating Plays, but Holding On to the Day Job

EARLIER in his career Sharr White wrote lavish plays: modern-day riffs on the ancient Greeks, plays with extravagant settings and lots of characters. He has ideas for more such epics, which he says would be great. Those are not the plays he’s writing right now.

“I’m trying to be smart about the pieces I write,” Mr. White said. “Look, if you spend three years on a play, you want it produced.”

He’ll get his wish Monday, when “The Other Place” opens at the Lucille Lortel Theater, presented by MCC Theater and featuring a manageable cast of four. After more than 15 years of writing plays, it’s his first major New York production — and it might lead local audiences to wonder where the 40-year-old Mr. White has been all this time. A cagy, emotionally resonant drama packed with plot twists, “The Other Place” brings to mind critical and audience favorites like “Proof” and “Wit” (another MCC production) while offering a plum role for a middle-aged actress.

Laurie Metcalf plays Dr. Juliana Smithton, a biophysicist specializing in dementia whose own medical problems embroil her family, her colleagues and a touchingly confused stranger in a mystery that involves the whereabouts of Juliana’s daughter. “It’s got the medical thing, it’s got the emotional thing, it’s got the mystery thing,” said Bernard Telsey, the co-artistic director of MCC Theater.

In other words, it’s got the kinds of things that get a show produced, not to mention a three-time Emmy Award-winning star in Ms. Metcalf (“Roseanne”).

Photo

Sharr WhiteCredit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Practicality is a common theme for Mr. White, who lives in Cold Spring, N.Y., with his wife and two young sons. When he’s not shuttling around to see his works produced in cities like Chicago, Louisville and Seattle, he works full time as a fashion copywriter, an occupation he credits for keeping his wordsmith skills up to speed.

“Sharr’s not isolated in a room with a candle,” said Hal Brooks, who directed Mr. White’s Iraq War drama “Six Years” at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville in 2006. “He gets up, writes, goes to his day job, comes home, raises a family and writes some more.”

Such a cozy life would seem to limit the kinds of experiences Mr. White can draw upon, but his extended family served as a considerable resource for “The Other Place.” He asked his father, a biophysicist, to sign off on the scientific material. (He has also asked his parents, with less success, about the origin of his first name. “I’m still trying to get that out of them,” he said.) It was another relative, however, who provided the genesis of the play.

“When my grandmother died, she was having thousands of these little vascular episodes,” he said. “And the night that she broke her hip, which was the beginning of her rapid decline, she was up in the dark packing her bags. And I thought: ‘There’s the metaphor. I mean, how poetic can you get? She’s packing her bags to go, and that’s when her departure begins.’ ”

After earning an M.F.A. from the graduate acting program at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Mr. White — who with his heavy-frame glasses and crisply parted haircut looks like Clark Kent at a Details magazine photo shoot — spent several years as a nonworking actor waiting on tables. All the while he wrote short plays (including one that was presented in a 38th-floor hotel room at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square) as well as screenplays and a novel “that was politely rejected by about 34 publishing houses.”

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Dennis Boutsikaris and Laurie Metcalf star in “The Other Place,” at Lucille Lortel Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

It wasn’t until “Six Years” was produced at Humana that he trained his creative efforts solely on playwriting. “I’m holding down a 9-to-5 job, I’m raising a family — there’s only so much I can do, so this is what I’m going to do,” he said recently over coffee at a Chelsea bistro.

Since 2006, in addition to “The Other Place,” Mr. White has written “Sunlight,” a political drama set in academia, and a two-character play called “Annapurna,” which will premiere next month as part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival in Costa Mesa, Calif.

To Mr. Brooks, who has seen drafts of all of Mr. White’s plays, “The Other Place” represents a synthesis of these various works. “I’ve read some incredibly experimental works of his and some well-made, Arthur Miller-style plays,” Mr. Brooks said, “and one thing I really like about ‘The Other Place’ is the way it blends these two styles.”

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Mr. White feels the success of the play hinges to a large degree on its leading lady. “In order for the play to work,” he said, “you have to buy that Juliana is the smartest person on earth. Only then can I start pulling out the loose thread that unravels her.”

This unraveling has been both challenging and inspiring, said Ms. Metcalf, who had previously worked with this play’s director, Joe Mantello, on “November” by David Mamet. “I’ve told Sharr a million times, ‘I don’t know how you crafted this thing so well,’ ” she said. “It’s tricky not to give anything away here, but although the play doesn’t present itself fully at first, you constantly get the sense that you’re in really good hands.”

While it is hard for Mr. White to picture anyone but Ms. Metcalf in this central role, he admitted that he was already doing just that, if in a vague — and eminently practical — way. “It just so happens that I really like writing about adults who have some history,” he said, “but every regional theater has a very strong leading woman who they turn to again and again. And it makes sense to find roles for these people.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2011, on Page AR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Creating Plays, But Holding On To the Day Job. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe